Two SpaceX Engineers Are Rebuilding the Test Bench Everyone Else Ignored

Somewhere right now, a hardware engineer is holding up a billion-dollar satellite constellation. Not because the satellite is broken. Because a gray box in the test rack - one whose firmware was last touched around the January 1997 revision of the USB Human Interface Device spec - just decided that all eight instruments on the bench should answer to the same name in Device Manager. Eight broken devices instead of one. That is the world Nine Fives wants to end.

Nine Fives, a company in Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch, makes radio-frequency (RF) test equipment for manufacturers of wireless devices - the radios inside cellphones, drones, and satellites. Its founders, Noah Levy and Andrew Kurtz, spent roughly a decade at SpaceX between them designing RF hardware and the systems that test it. They came away with a specific, unglamorous grudge: the instruments were the problem.

"I am not a fan of modern RF test equipment from legacy vendors," Levy says. It is the kind of line that sounds mild until you have lived it.

01 / THE PROBLEMThe instrument that eats your release date

RF test equipment is the least-discussed corner of hardware, which is exactly why it stays broken. To ship a radio - any radio - you have to measure it: how much power it puts out, how cleanly it switches, how it behaves across frequencies. That measurement happens on a bench of specialized boxes: attenuators, switches, signal generators, analyzers.

The boxes work. The trouble is everything around them. Drivers written for a Windows version two decades gone. Documentation locked inside a PDF on a password-protected FTP server. A vendor who leaves your email on read for a week, then sends a VB.NET script and wishes you luck. In Nine Fives' telling, you run that script and watch all eight of the vendor's devices in your rack try to enumerate as "COM11." The bench, not the product, becomes the thing on the critical path.

If that sounds like a niche complaint, consider the stakes attached to it. The engineers Nine Fives is describing are not tinkerers. They are the people gating a phone launch or a satellite constellation, where a week lost to a driver conflict is a week of a factory line sitting idle. In high-volume manufacturing, the instrument that measures the product has to be as reliable and as scriptable as the product itself. When it isn't, the whole schedule inherits the instrument's bad habits. That is the quiet cost Nine Fives is trying to put a number on: not the price of the box, but the price of the delay the box causes.

02 / THE PRODUCTDriverless, networked, and legible to machines

Nine Fives' answer is to redesign the instrument from the connector inward. Its equipment is driverless - no vendor software to install, no COM ports to fight over. Each module has a touchscreen on the front and speaks a single, machine-readable API with both REST endpoints (the language of the modern web) and SCPI (the decades-old lab standard the industry already knows). You can talk to it like a website or like a lab instrument. It answers either way.

Every module works on its own. But slot several into the company's rack-mountable power-and-data backplane and a second layer appears: NineVue, a web app that generates machine-readable configurations for the whole rack, and a skill.md file shipped in the box. That last detail is the tell. A skill.md is documentation written for an AI agent to read, so the agent can understand the test system and write the test software itself. Most instrument makers hide their manuals. Nine Fives hands them to the robot.

The choice to keep SCPI alongside REST is a small piece of diplomacy that says a lot about the team. SCPI - Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments - is the lingua franca every test engineer already types in their sleep. A startup eager to look modern might have dropped it and demanded everyone learn a new way. Nine Fives kept it, then bolted a REST interface on top for the web-native tooling and AI agents that are increasingly writing the scripts. You do not have to abandon what you know to adopt it, which is usually the difference between an instrument that gets bought and one that gets admired from a distance.

03 / THE LINEUPAn attenuator and a switch, to start

The first two products are deliberately narrow: the POE-ATTEN-6G, a programmable attenuator that dials RF power up and down, and the POE-SWITCH-6G, an SPDT switch that routes a signal between paths. Both carry the integrated touchscreen, both ride the same network API, and both debuted at IMS 2026 - the microwave industry's largest trade show - with what the company describes as AI-assisted test automation. They ship with a 30-day money-back guarantee and a two-year warranty, which is its own quiet argument against the incumbents.

04 / THE FOUNDERSPeople who lived on the wrong side of the bench

Noah Levy, the CEO, was a six-time award winner at SpaceX. He was the responsible engineer for the Falcon 9 radar altimeter and the Dragon 2 S-Band transceiver, designed GPS and S-Band radios on Starship, and calibrated the largest phased array in the company's history. Andrew Kurtz, the COO, spent close to a decade as a mechanical engineer across aerospace, working on payload integration and spacecraft systems. Between them they were the customers the legacy vendors kept on hold.

That background matters for a hardware startup, because RF is unforgiving and the people who buy this gear can smell a team that has never sweated over a noise floor at 2 a.m. Nine Fives is selling to its former selves.

It also shapes what the company is credible building next. Calibrating a phased array or qualifying a spacecraft transceiver is not a one-instrument job; it is dozens of measurements chained together, each one a chance for the bench to introduce an error the product never had. Founders who have run those chains know which parts hurt, which is why the first two products - an attenuator and a switch - are the humble, high-frequency workhorses rather than a flashy analyzer. Fix the parts everyone touches a hundred times a day, and you earn the right to sell the parts they touch once.

05 / THE MARKETA comfortable industry with a soft underbelly

Test and measurement is dominated by large, established names - Keysight, Rohde & Schwarz, Anritsu among them - selling instruments that are technically excellent and, by Nine Fives' account, painful to integrate. That is the opening. A $130 billion market that still routes documentation through FTP is not defended by great software; it is defended by inertia and switching costs. Nine Fives' wager is that a new generation of hardware teams, many of them already handing work to AI agents, will pay for instruments that were built for how they actually work now. Incumbents can match a spec sheet, but they cannot easily match a philosophy, and a bench designed around drivers and PDFs is a philosophy as much as a product.

It is early. The team is two people, the seed check was modest, and an attenuator and a switch are the start of a catalog, not the whole thing. But the shape of the bet is clear, and it is a bet on boredom being expensive.

05.5 / THE MODELSell the box, keep the software honest

The business is, at its core, hardware. Nine Fives sells physical instruments to the teams that build radios, and the revenue is the same shape as the industry it is challenging - you buy a module, you own a module. What is different is where the value accumulates. The touchscreen, the unified API, NineVue, and the AI-readable docs are not upsells bolted on later; they are the reason to pick the box in the first place, and they are hard for a legacy competitor to graft onto a two-decade-old firmware base. The 30-day money-back guarantee and two-year warranty are the sort of terms a company offers when its main sales obstacle is disbelief that test gear can be this straightforward.

Selling into aerospace, telecom, and consumer electronics also means selling into a room full of people who can evaluate the claims. That cuts both ways. The bar is high and the buyers are skeptical, but a design that genuinely removes a week of driver misery does not need a marketing budget to spread - it travels desk to desk, engineer to engineer, the way good tools always have.

06 / THE TIMELINEFrom SpaceX bench to trade-show floor

For a customer, the practical promise is narrow and concrete: plug the module into your network, drive it from a browser or a script, point your AI agent at the skill.md, and let it write the test routine you would otherwise spend a week hand-coding. Multiply that across a rack and a production line and the "months to minutes" line stops sounding like a slogan and starts sounding like a spreadsheet. Whether the hardware holds up to that promise is the thing the next year will settle. The idea, at least, is legible to anyone who has waited on a vendor.

The name is worth a second look. In hardware reliability, "five nines" - 99.999% uptime - is the gold standard. Flip it around and you get Nine Fives: a company whose whole reason to exist is the gap between the equipment engineers are promised and the equipment they're stuck with at 11 p.m.